Research

Overview

Literature offers programs, projects, and research initiatives outside the classroom. These reflect a wide range of faculty research interests, including: digital media, pedagogy, and archives; global culture; colonialism, postcolonialism, and the literature of travel; early modern literature and culture; and science, technology, and modernity. In addition, close collaboration between the Literature and Comparative Media Studies/Writing programs at MIT underpins ongoing research on such topics as television history, the history of the book, and popular literary, visual, and musical culture.

The particular work of individual Literature faculty may be found on their webpages. Below are several major ongoing collective initiatives that combine research and pedagogy and provide outreach to global communities of students, scholars, and friends.

MIT Comparative Global Humanities Initiative

MIT Global Shakespeare Project

French+

Teaching Melville

Annotation Studio

Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium Series

Margaret MacVicar Memorial AMITA Oral History Project

The Dickens Project

The Center for Black Studies

MIT Comparative Global Humanities Initiative
Faculty Contact:
Wiebke Denecke
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The Comparative Global Humanities Initiative (GHI) was born in 2021 with the goal of creating an MIT-based worldwide community that works globally towards reinvigorating humanistic learning and education by radically expanding the geographical scope and temporal depth of humanistic disciplines, reimagining thereby their critical relevance to the grand challenges of today’s world. GHI supports the study of the world’s cultures and their diverse histories in all their historical, linguistic, cultural, scientific and technological manifestations; promotes the creation of new cross-disciplinary methodologies and theories based on the world’s cultural archives and conceptual vocabularies; and advances the critical study of the social, political, and creative functions of cultural heritage in today’s world.
MIT Global Shakespeare Project

Faculty Contact:
Peter S. Donaldson
Diana Henderson

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Go to MITx Course

Since its launch in 2010 the MIT Global Shakespeares Video and Performance Archive has been at the forefront of efforts to use modern technologies as tools for understanding the continuing relevance of Shakespeare in the modern world. Through the archive and focused educational initiatives the project is playing a major leadership role internationally in moving Shakespearean scholarship and teaching toward new models that draw from the full range of global theatrical production. Working with a global network of editors and collaborators, MIT’s Shakespeare Project is expanding its collections and developing authoring tools for education that can be easily used at all levels — from advanced scholars to university and high school students and the general public.

French+
Faculty Contact:
Bruno Perreau
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The French+ Initiative at MIT gathers scholars working across the humanities and social sciences, whose research and teaching center on the French and francophone cultures and societies.

The French+ Initiative hosts the MIT Global France Seminar and cultural events. Its many connections, including teaching exchanges, an Arts Sponsorship, a Visiting Professorship, a Book Prize, and a cultural immersion trip for MIT students, promote local and international collaborations.

The French+ Initiative is a member of the “Centers of Excellence in the US” network administered by the French Embassy.

Teaching Melville

Faculty Contact:
Wyn Kelley

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Since 2000 the New Bedford Whaling Museum (NBWM) has partnered with the Melville Society Cultural Project (MSCP) in programming for the annual Moby-Dick Marathon and in maintaining the Melville Society Archive in the Museum’s library. The three organizations have produced two Summer Institutes for School Teachers with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) with a third scheduled for June-July 2024.

Literature Section’s Senior Lecturer Wyn Kelley was co-director of the 2021 and 2024 Summer Institutes and one of six Melville scholars from the MSCP who served as lead faculty of the Institute.

Annotation Studio
Faculty Contact:
Wyn Kelley
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ANNOTATION STUDIO is a digital annotation tool developed in MIT’s digital humanities lab, the HyperStudio, in a collaboration between Wyn Kelley (Literature) and Kurt Fendt (HyperStudio Director), Annotation Studio provides a digital workspace in which users may 1) upload a text and select and annotate elements of it, with particular attention to its multimedia sources and adaptations, and 2) use their findings for research and writing projects in humanities classrooms. Such an approach can create lively social communities, help students appreciate literary works more fully, and heighten their sophistication in using their digital-literacy skills.

For more information:
https://www.annotationstudio.org/
MIT affiliates:
https://mit.annotationstudio.org
Non-MIT affiliates:
https://app.annotationstudio.org/

Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium Series
Faculty Contact:
Stephanie Frampton
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The Ancient & Medieval Studies Colloquium Series is an interdisciplinary series of talks held throughout the academic year featuring distinguished speakers across fields relating to Ancient & Medieval Studies. Past speakers have been from a variety of fields, including Art & Architecture, Classics, Linguistics, Philosophy, History, and Literature. Colloquiums are free and open to the public.
Margaret MacVicar Memorial AMITA Oral History Project
Faculty Contact:
Margery Resnick
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The Margaret MacVicar Memorial AMITA Oral History Project seeks to preserve the rich and diverse experiences of MIT alumnae by documenting the lives of women who attended MIT. Through the auspices of UROP, undergraduate students conduct background research on the lives of their subjects and then interview them to learn about their experiences in detail. The project was conceived as a way to provide a history of experiences of women who often pursued careers untraditional for women.

The project is named in memory of Margaret MacVicar, class of 1964, the founder of UROP. The project is directed by Margery Resnick, Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies. AMITA members began raising an endowment for the project in 1990.

The oral histories are a resource for researchers of the history of women in the fields of science, engineering, technology, and architecture; the role of women in higher education; and the evolution of the involvement of women at MIT.

AMITA Index of Dome Interviews | Dome Archive

The Dickens Project
Faculty Contact:
James Buzard
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A multi-university consortium with numerous member institutions in the US and several foreign countries. It promotes the study and appreciation not only of the work of Charles Dickens but, more broadly, of the literature and culture of nineteenth-century Britain and other industrializing nations. It also seeks to bring together a unique collection of communities – professors, graduate students, undergraduates, high school teachers and students, and lay readers. Every year, this diverse community of 250-300 people comes together at the “Dickens Universe” in Santa Cruz, California, for an intense week of lectures, seminars, and conversation about all matters Dickensian, Victorian, and modern. Professor of Literature James Buzard has represented MIT at the Dickens Universe for over a decade. He is a member of the Executive Committee of the Dickens Project and co-director of the Dickens Universe.

The Center for Black Studies
Faculty Contact:
Joshua Bennett

The Green-Taylor Lectures is a speaker series celebrating the intersections of Black Studies, Architecture and Design. Over the course of the year, the series will feature voices from across these fields in an effort to illuminate both the unique history of African American architects here at MIT—the Institute's first Black graduate, Robert R. Taylor, as well as two of the first Black women to attend MIT, Marie Turner and Gloria Green, all studied architecture during their time on campus—and contemporary work in the field that honors the role of worldmaking in the Black expressive tradition.

The People’s Poetry Archive is a 2023-24 Mellon Faculty Grant Project by Professor Joshua Bennett. It is a public humanities project setting out to digitally preserve canonical and contemporary poems from across the African diaspora, as well as historically under-theorized works in the realm of spoken word performance. Inspired by the Black feminist poet and educator June Jordan’s vision of “a people’s poetry”—a term she traces to the democratic imaginings of Walt Whitman—the creation of the archive represents an opportunity to address modern questions about the vitality and utility of poetry through sustained cross-pollination between institutions and social scenes. The project is an opportunity for those unfamiliar with poetry’s standard protocols to be surprised, enchanted, and drawn into the fold. Through a combination of live events, invited submissions, and collaborations with university libraries across the country, Bennett creates one of the most capacious living archives of the literary arts—a database featuring not only individual poems, but also recorded interviews, video footage, and a range of other historical materials—anywhere in the world.